Josie Sigler: Living Must Bury

Her loss, our gain

Sigler is the recipient of Fence Books’s 2010 Motherwell Prize, awarded to a first or second collection of poems written in English by a woman. This new collection is a book of mourning and meditations on loss. To set the stage for these complicated emotions, Sigler looks to relationships with family and neighbors. Her words carry the weight of events that happen across the globe, like her mother’s awakening in 1975 pressed against the invasion of East Timor that same year. For Sigler, life’s more full of melancholic endings than new beginnings.